Lucy waited for Greg to leave before landing on Matthias’s shoulder.

  For a moment, she said nothing. Her wings buzzed softly, an unconscious tell that she was more unsettled than she wanted to admit. Matthias felt it through the bond anyway—the tight, worried coil of her thoughts pressing against his own. He did not look up from the map spread across the table, but he shifted slightly to give her a more stable perch.

  “Can we not use the manticores?” she nearly begged. “Sure, they are probably great at inflicting violence, but surely they are too much.”

  “They might not be enough,” Matthias admitted as he continued to study his map. “I did not tell Greg this, but the manticores can cultivate. I created them to live off mana even if there is no food present. They were meant to be part of my first wave of life to leave my dungeon.”

  “But can they even make a dent in that?” Lucy asked.

  “I am not sure,” Matthias responded with a sigh. He leaned back slightly, letting the bench creak beneath his weight as his eyes traced the borders he had drawn and redrawn a dozen times already. The chaotic region seemed to loom larger every time he looked at it, as though the tumorous growth of mana were creeping outward. He rubbed his temple as he thought. “I will need to make something more. I will need to make an organism that is hardy, long-lived, capable of filtering, and… and…” Matthias trailed off as he got that faraway look in his eye that Lucy was all too familiar with by this point. “Yes, that could work,” he mused.

  “Mind telling the rest of us?” Chloe asked as she descended from above.

  “I don’t think I should,” Matthias admitted. “This could go wrong in so many ways. It’s better you all not know.”

  “I am getting really tired of being left in the dark,” Lucy huffed.

  “As the head agent of F.I.R.S., I demand to know what you are spending on this project,” Chloe countered.

  “One dragon turtle,” Matthias assured her.

  “Is that not too little?” Serenia asked. “How could so little make a drastic change in something so large?”

  “Do seeds not start out small?” Matthias asked. “Do children not start out small? The future always needs to start small. It is only through faith, nourishment, and pruning that we can ensure we get the future we want. It is when any of those three are neglected that it gets away from us. But even with the best planning and faith, sometimes things still go wrong.”

  “You sound like you can’t make up your mind,” Lucy pointed out.

  “Honestly, I can’t,” Matthias admitted. His voice was quieter now, stripped of its earlier certainty. “Every path forward branches into risks I can see and dozens more I can’t. I keep circling the same conclusion, hoping it will change.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, then exhaled slowly. He created his idea, gave it to one of his manticores with a set of orders, and then dispatched a pride of about thirty manticores to the roiling mass of chaotic mana. “I can’t really do any pruning or nourishing from this far away. So all I can do is have faith.”

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  Matthias watched with pride as the estimated time of arrival for his manticores into the area settled at only four days.

  Even so, unease gnawed at him. Speed was meaningless if what awaited them simply dissolved their work the moment they arrived. He replayed the projections in his mind—mana flows, feedback loops, points where cultivation might stabilize or catastrophically fail. The numbers never lied, but they also never told the whole story.

  “They really can fly fast,” Chloe noted. “They very much look like infernal creatures as well. I am surprised no other dungeon has created something akin to them before.”

  “I mean, they kind of did,” Matthias said. “Remember, dragons have the brain of a cat. I just reduced the amount of reptile and made the cat portions more pronounced.”

  “You made nightmares with legs,” Lucy quipped.

  “No, that would be malks,” Matthias quipped back.

  “Don’t remind me,” Lucy groaned.

  “Malks?” Serenia asked.

  “Cats that are magical in nature,” Chloe began.

  “They are fey cats,” Rey said proudly. “Part of the Unseelie. But they are nightmares given the flesh and form of a black cat— all sharp edges and predatory instinct. They can stalk both the waking and dream worlds.”

  “That is horrifying,” Serenia said flatly.

  “They won’t bother us,” Matthias assured her. “Besides, they are still cats.”

  “You say that like it explains anything,” Lucy argued.

  “It actually does,” Serenia admitted with a pained look.

  “So, we now have an army of murder kitties,” Chloe pressed, folding her wings as she hovered closer to the map. “That’s… not exactly a full strategy.”

  “It’s not meant to be,” Matthias replied. He tapped the map lightly, right at the heart of the chaotic zone. “It’s simply the first step. I need to know more.”

  “What's next then?" Chloe asked.

  “Next? No idea, honestly,” Matthias admitted. “We are kind of in a wait-and-see phase. Greg is carrying my permission for everyone to move here to the rest of the world. I am making moves that I have no way of predicting the outcome of. Those that know what is going on won’t—or can’t—tell me what is happening. So I can’t make optimal moves.”

  His fairies grimaced.

  “Sometimes you have to act on faith and hope it is enough,” Serenia added.

  Matthias nodded. “I have never really been one to lean on hope. I was always the one who made his own luck. But there is too much I just can’t prove or don’t know.”

  “Where would you normally look?” Lucy asked.

  “Deeper,” Matthias answered. His gaze unfocused, looking past the walls of the dungeon and far beyond the horizon. “In my old world, the past leaves scars. Bones become fossils. Cities become ruins. Even when everything else is gone, something remains to say, ‘This happened.’ Here, there’s nothing. No strata. No history written into the stone. There is no fossil layer. There is no buildup of sediment around remains or structures. It is like this is the first age. Like all life has been wiped from the planet an uncountable number of times. Like the remains of the past were simply erased in their entirety. It is as though every civilization that was forgotten to time was forgotten by reality itself.”

  “So, there is nothing else to be done,” Chloe concluded. “We can’t look back for answers, there is no help in the now. All we can do is push forward.”

  Matthias nodded with a heavy sigh. “I don’t know if what I’m doing will heal this world or scar it further. All I know is that standing still guarantees nothing will change.”

  He looked at each of them in turn—Lucy, Chloe, Serenia, Rey—his family, his anchors. “If this goes wrong,” he added quietly, “I will own that mistake. But if it goes right… then maybe this won’t be the last age after all. Onward, with both eyes open. Steadily onward—toward the dawn of a new age, or the end of the world.”